Parts

Sometimes I feel like this whole place is falling in around my ears.

Fixing vaporators, or anything else on this planet for that matter, has become increasingly difficult over the years. It's not because the technology has been advancing too fast: on the contrary, most technologies have pretty much stagnated in the last ten years or so, which means your mechanical skills never get outdated.

The trouble is that it gets harder and harder to find replacement parts. It's always been a hassle to get things out here; the shipping fees are astronomical. (No pun intended.) But a lot of the industrial manufacturers have either gone out of business or been taken over by the Empire to build war machines in the last decade or so.

There is exactly ONE company that still makes new vaporators and parts. They are exactly the quality and price you would expect from a company that has no competitors.

A new condenser coil for a medium-size agro/industrial vaporator costs around 75. That's not a bad price. But shipping is 450! And that's PER coil! Because the factory is on Coruscant (the alleged bright spot in this galaxy), and we're out here.

But you're in luck! If the coil breaks while it is still under warranty, you can pay another 450 to send it back and they will refund your 75 credits. Don't spend it all in one place.

You can see why we don't like to buy new replacement parts from the factory. The vaporators are not cheap to buy or ship either, obviously, but they are a slightly better deal if you think of them as a bulk purchase of spare parts. The Guild puts in an order for a couple of new vaporators each year for this reason.

Most often, when I need a new part, I start by looking at my own dead vaporator collection to see if I already have what I need. If not, I ask around, and if I have to, I'll go into town and see if I can find it at a junkyard. (Salvage was always profitable on Tatooine, but it's been insane ever since the Empire took over the Republic.) As a last resort, I will check online and see if something is available within a few parsecs. Only if I am absolutely sure that the right part isn't available used, I'll get a new one from the Guild. But it's expensive.

And all that would still be bearable if the parts were compatible. They hardly ever are. Usually, they are different sizes, different brands, sometimes even different technologies. You almost always have to rig either the part or the vaporator (sometimes both) in order to get them to play nice together.

What I'm saying is that if you're looking for a compressor, you're lucky to find one at all. If it actually works and you don't have to repair it before you install it, you can consider yourself very fortunate indeed. And if it's truly compatible with the vaporator you're transplanting it into, you will probably kill yourself because you'll know that you've just had the luckiest day of your life and it's all going to be downhill from then on.

Don't even get me STARTED on what this does to the software.

The Skywalker kid is pretty good at the hardware retrofits. Kenobi (who isn't a moisture farmer but insists on using a residential vaporator that's always on the verge of collapse) is miserable with hardware, but he's a genius with software. You'd think Lars would see a sorely-needed business opportunity there, but... well, there's a lot of weirdness between Lars and Kenobi which I'm not sure I really understand, and I can't get into it now. Suffice it to say that I would really like to knock their heads together.

Next time Owen Lars complains that he can't find a decent water level sensor, I'm going to remind him what it was like when his father was running the farm, when the techno-industrial sector was thriving and healthy and you had a choice of coils, sensors, etc. I don't think he remembers how much better things were before the Empire took over and I don't think he's able to imagine how much worse they can get. Sure Coruscant is far away, but the misery is going to trickle out here sooner or later.